Sharks attack humans, but most sharks don't attack humans: How children learn to express generics  

My talk will examine the challenges that learners face when acquiring generic language (e.g., "Sharks attack humans"). Generics are both conceptually and linguistically challenging.  Although we experience the world in terms of individual objects and events, we must form abstractions that extend beyond these individual entities.  Moreover, the same forms of language that are used to express generics are also used to refer to particular individuals (compare "The dog is a 4-legged animal" to "The dog is sleeping").  Furthermore, simple statistical frequency models are (arguably) insufficient to account for generic use.  Despite these challenges, children the world over acquire generics with surprising ease.  I discuss different kinds of learning models, and suggest that generics are a default mode of generalization for human learners.